Boxing promoter Don King, a self-proclaimed supporter of President George W. Bush, overstated the share of the black vote that Bush received in the November 2 presidential election. Appearing on the November 11 edition of FOX News Channel's Hannity & Colmes, King claimed that through his efforts with the Bush-Cheney '04 campaign, “we made a big, dramatic contribution and changed that vote from 9 to 18 percent.” King made the erroneous claim as evidence that the Democrats will "[n]o longer ... be able to hold us [blacks] in bondage."

King's 18-percent figure is incorrect. According to exit polling from the presidential election, 11 percent of black voters selected Bush, while 88 percent voted for Senator John Kerry. Bush received 9 percent of the black vote in the 2000 presidential election.

King appeared to mistakenly refer to a pre-election poll conducted from September 15 to October 10 by the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies. The poll indicated that 18 percent of survey respondents preferred Bush, compared with 69 percent for Kerry. But that poll, as CBS News noted on October 20, was not a reliable predictor of black voter preferences, according to David Bositis, Joint Center senior research associate. CBS reported that the poll “at first blush was encouraging for President Bush. ... But Bositis emphasize[d] that the poll did not hedge for likely or registered voters.” Bositis's remark indicates the weakness of the poll as a vote predictor: The survey results came from “a national sample of 850 adult African Americans” that did not differentiate between registered voters and those who were not registered, meaning that the poll results likely included a large number of blacks who were not registered to vote.